Digital Storm Bolt II: Devil’s Canyon Inside

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Introduction and Specifications

Until such time as Valve gets its ducks in a row, those of us who want a console-like Steam experience are sticking with DIY PCs, Big Picture mode and a third-party controller. Digital Storm, however, thinks it has a killer system for your living room Big Picture setup (or for use as your main gaming rig if you’re a mouse and keyboard type) in the newly updated Bolt II.

The Bolt II is a midsize system that fits some powerful components into a very sleek, sophisticated case – one that looks as good standing upright as it does on its side, which is an important feature for a computer that might end up on your home theater setup. At $3,481 (as tested), the Bolt II’s price tag might raise some eyebrows, but the price strikes us as unsurprising for this rig, which is a luxury PC, after all. Given the prices we’ve seen in luxury gaming PCs of late, the Bolt II is certainly pricey, but not out of line with expecations. Let’s take a look at what goes into a Digital Storm Bolt II.

When building our test system, Digital Storm paired an Intel Core i7-4790K 4GHz processor with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics card. We liked what we saw when we reviewed the quad-core Devil’s Canyon CPU in June, so we’re not surprised to see PC builders tapping the processor for high-end gaming machines. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti is a reasonable choice as well, but where the Core i7-4790K is the most expensive processor you can select from Digital Storm’s online configurator for the Bolt II, the GTX 780 Ti isn’t at the top of the video card list. You can opt for a 6GB GeForce GTX Titan Black or even a 12GB GeForce GTX Titan Z.

Space is limited in any mid-tower chassis, but the Bolt II is particularly slim. Given the space constraints, it’s not surprising to see a mini-ITX board in the Bolt II. In this case, Digital Storm chose an Asus Z97I-Plus motherboard which provides both Gigabit LAN and 802.11a/b/g/n/ac dual band wireless connectivity. Our review unit includes 16GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR3 1866MHz system memory and plenty of storage, thanks to a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD and a 2TB Western Digital Black Edition hard drive. That’s not a surprising setup for a gaming/entertainment PC in this category, but if isn’t your style, don’t fret. Digital Storm’s configurator has a ton of hard drive options.

Other components worth mentioning are the Blu-ray player/DVD writer the 500W power supply, and a slick CPU liquid cooling system that we’ll describe in more detail later on. Because Digital Storm considers the Bolt II to be as comfortable in the living room as on your desk, our review unit included the Steam Big Picture Gaming package, which features Steam set to Big Picture mode and a Microsoft Wireless Xbox 360 Controller.

Xbox 360 Wireless Controller

Digital Storm also offers several monitors, including 4k monitors. If you're going to invest in a high-end gaming system, it may also be time to upgrade your display.